Understanding the Timeline
A picture is worth a thousand words
Purpose of the Timeline
Similar to the Trauma Egg, each client has a unique Timeline. When your clients present their Trauma Egg, they had the opportunity to hear from you and/or the group members being fair witness’s to their story. They will have that same opportunity with the Timeline, but the Timeline will include positive events with significant people or animals that were present during their lifetime.
After your clients finished presenting their Trauma Egg, they received feedback from you and the group. They completed their Negative and Positive Mission Statements. They identified patterns, rules and how relationships functioned. The Timeline exercise will help your clients identify with more of the positives, their accomplishments and achievements.
The Bigger Picture
A Timeline allows your client to have a bird’s eye view of their life and to see the positive and negative shifts along the way on a single trajectory.
Client Outcomes
After completing both the Trauma Egg and Timeline exercises, your clients will begin to experience the following (this will often happen organically during the weeks and months that follow):
- See the themes that are still active in their present day life and let go of the negative patterns.
- Have a new wisdom toward growth, lessons and relationships.
- Value negative shifts as opportunities toward positive shifts.
- Have a sense of purpose by connecting to their story in a new way.
- Find new meaning.
- Understand that it was their responses to the events that shaped their lives, and not the event. That the way they survived and responded are no longer pathologized.
- Learn to that they are free to be themselves, to access choices and to exercise agency.